Top-ranking Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee have asked Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to freeze all future requests for climate-related spending, saying that it is inappropriate to transfer money to developing nations while the U.S. economy is struggling.

The letter — signed by Sens. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, David Vitter of Louisiana, George Voinovich of Ohio and John Barrasso of Wyoming — warns U.S. negotiators not to give away too much during the U.N. climate conference that is under way in Cancun, Mexico.

Climate-related appropriations grew from $315 million in fiscal 2009 to $1.3 billion in fiscal 2010. The Obama administration requested $1.9 billion for fiscal 2011 so it could pay its share of an international fund for adaptation to climate change, which would total $100 billion through 2020.

The adaptation fund was part of the Copenhagen Accord, an agreement that emerged from last year’s talks in Denmark. Negotiators were trying to pin down more of the details in Cancun, but the biggest development so far has been Japan’s insistence that it won’t work to extend the Kyoto Protocol when the agreement — which provides the basis for the climate talks — expires in 2012 (ClimateWire, Dec. 2).

Barrasso, the top Republican on the Senate panel’s oversight subcommittee, compared the agreements to the government-funded rescue of the financial system.

“It makes no sense for the United States to now spend billions of taxpayer dollars to fight climate change in other countries,” Barrasso said in a statement. “Americans are concerned about jobs, the economy, the debt and spending. If the administration is serious about listening to the American people, they will cancel this international climate change bailout.”

Full Text of the letter:

December 2, 2010

The Honorable Hillary Rodham Clinton

Secretary of State

U.S. Department of State

2201 C Street NW

Washington, DC 20520

Dear Secretary Clinton:

As the sixteenth Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is set to enter its second week, we remain opposed to the U.S. commitment to full implementation of the Copenhagen Accord, which will transfer billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to developing nations in the name of climate change.

We understand that climate-related appropriations for 2010 totaled $1.3 billion, which is more than triple from 2009 levels at $315 million. The President also requested another sizeable increase of $1.9 billion for Fiscal Year 2011, as the Administration seeks to fund its share of this $100 billion global commitment by 2020. We do not believe that billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars should be transferred to developing countries through unaccountable multilateral or bilateral channels for adaptation, deforestation and other international climate finance programs.

In the November 2nd election, Americans clearly expressed their concerns about record deficit spending. The U.S. Treasury Department’s Fiscal Year 2010 year-end report showed that the federal deficit hit $1.29 trillion, topping $1 trillion for the second straight year in a row. These deficits are in addition to our existing debt, which is currently at $13.6 trillion. We simply cannot afford any new massive spending programs with such debt owed by America’s future generations.

Concern about deficits and spending stems in large part from the fact that millions of Americans are struggling to find employment. In October, the unemployment rate in the United States stood at 9.6 percent. As spending dramatically increases, Americans believe there is a connection between Washington profligacy and the ability of employers to create jobs.

In addition, several of the findings of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concerning the eventual impacts of climate change in developing countries were found to be exaggerated or simply not true. We understand that reforms of the IPCC process are currently underway and we believe that no American taxpayer dollars should be committed to a global climate fund based on information that is not accurate.

In light of the federal government’s dire financial situation and the poor state of the economy, in addition to ongoing reviews at the IPCC, we request that the Administration freeze further spending requests to implement international climate change finance programs. This would include making no additional international commitments to fund such programs.

OK hope I’m wrong but this petition will fail. It already has in one respect. It’s far too sensible and employs logic.
Wrong strategy to employ when appealing to the Cuckoo Nest inverted thought process that today’s politicians use as an invisibility cloak to thwart apple-pie attacks.
Great idea, guys and gals. Poor timing and a poorer audience.
10/10 for trying though!

To the American, European, Canadian, other rich country taxpayers — in case you think that your tax money is really helping improve or reduce poverty in poorer countries like the Philippines, think again. Foreign aid, like climate aid, is government to government. Thus, much of the foreign aid money is spent on politicians, bureaucracies (USAID, WB, UN, ADB, IMF, etc.), national bureaucracies and bureaucrats, consultants, and their endless travels and meetings. Little is left on the target beneficiaries, the poor. The same thing will happen with climate foreign aid.

As soon as republicans get control of the house they can jsut refuse to provide the money. Could lead to a standoff, but I’d imagine that it’s one that the american people would enthusiastically support.

Since summer, signs of severe food insecurity — droughts, food riots, five- to tenfold increases in produce costs — have erupted around the globe. Several new reports now argue that regionally catastrophic crop failures — largely due to heat stress — are signals that global warming may have begun outpacing the ability of farmers to adapt.

There is no climate emergency. Everything observed today is fully explained by natural variability. The climate is well within its past parameters. In fact, the temperature now is especially benign. Despite the squeals of those financially benefitting from the money confiscated from taxpayers and handed over to them, there is no verifiable evidence showing that CO2 makes any difference at all. It may make a minor difference, but the effect is insignificant compared with natural variability.

The extravagant spending at Cancun shows exactly how our tax money is being wasted by these scoundrels. And we are expected to give them more??

Those tens of thousands of international parasites will intercept this proposed “bailout” money, and pocket it. And the global temperature will not change by one micro-degree as a result. This proposed giveaway is nothing less than looting the working people based on the AGW scam being promoted by UN/IPCC kleptocrats.

The promoters of “climate change,” “AGW” and “carbon” are ravenous hyenas who can never get their greedy hands on enough of other peoples’ money. And they always demand more, more, more, having come to expect their taxpayer-provided feasts of lobster, caviar, brie and champagne – profligate gluttony which is always paid for by working stiffs, and by the deluded fools who send their money to NGOs like the WWF, Greenpeace, etc.

“Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.”

As they try to roll back modern society, the greedy UN connivers party the days and nights away at Cancun this week, where they jetted in, and took limos from the airport to their $450 a night hotel rooms – paid for by ordinary folks like you and me.

“In light of the federal government’s dire financial situation and the poor state of the economy, in addition to ongoing reviews at the IPCC, we request that the Administration freeze further spending requests to implement international climate change finance programs. This would include making no additional international commitments to fund such programs.”
=======================
I would add:
Unless such funds come from the duly elected officials campaign war chest.
Subject to whatever kind of transparency is being flouted, of late.

This is probably all just another déjà vu red herring thrown out by the republicans to get the quail/pheasant hunt’n buddy aristocrats back in power and the lemmings are licking it up again. In a decade you’ll all be screaming at the top of your lungs after their big money friends pull off their smokescreen fallacy. The republic is toast.

Hillary, while First Lady of Arkansas served on the Wal~Mart board of directors. According to press accounts at the time, she was a show horse at the company’s annual meetings when founder Sam Walton bussed in cheering throngs to celebrate his non-union empire, which is headquartered in one of the country’s poorest states. According to published reports, she was placed in charge of the company’s “green” program to protect the environment and promote the buy American smokescreen fallacy. But nobody got greener than Sam Walton and his family. Shipping boats back and forth between Chinese slave labor factories and the Port of LA or Oakland is not green, efficient or sustainable (even if a Show Pony propagandist is paid to greenwash it).

The Clintons depended on Wal-Mart’s largesse not only for Hillary’s regular payments as a board member & litigator but for travel expenses on Wal-Mart planes and for heavy campaign contributions to Bill’s campaigns there and nationally.

These huntin’ buddies with the tag along Bush crime family gave Walton a globalization death grip over the “means of production” (others shortly adopted) by thrashing the trade agreements that had built our modern economy and protected US businesses for almost 200 years.

These quail hunter aristocrats gave preferred trading status to Communist China about 1972. Coincidentally the same time as Edmund de Rothschild and Maurice Strong hatched the global warming scheme followed by UN, IPCC, etc.

The notion that human activity and manmade greenhouse gasses are in any way contributing to something catastrophic is simply a fantasy designed to extract large amounts of cash for people’s research careers and to facilitate global redistribution of wealth by forcing industrial production to move to less restrictive countries.

We’ve been had. We are better than this. Have we turned into mongoloids?

That’s why I vote for the small candle in the dark. Constitution Party we can make it into whatever we voice.

I say they should go to Americas billionaires and make them pay for it since they seem to want it the most, also the Hollywood elite millionaires. And bt the sight of Hillary photo no wonder bill wandered.

Smokey says:
December 2, 2010 at 3:56 pm
There is no climate emergency.

===============================

Agreed on their bogus “climate emergency”.

However….there may be an emergency looming the other direction.

Because if we do get a dramatic cooldown, as I am sure you will agree, we will be unprepared….as our brainless “leaders” have been barking up the wrong tree(s) for the past generation or so…if not longer.

Fear the cold….not the warm. OK….NO FEAR (I love that phrase)….but you know what I mean!

There may be an emergency…and it could become chaotic fast…..and is within the realms of natural variability.

The question is….are we prepared??

We are not.

We are letting current Obama administration be totally REACTIVE to the oil spill in the Gulf….i.e. banning any offshore drilling in the Atlantic until 2017.

We are cutting off our noses to spite our faces (chances are noses will be frozen anyway) and letting some outrageous ideologue and his hitmen bankrupt the American economy in a time of stress.

I don’t think so.

There may WELL indeed be a climate emergency.

But it is for the opposite reason and because the green idiots don’t understand the times anymore than the industrialists who destroyed the “green” in the first place and caused the greens to overreact!!

Food security wanes as world warms
Global warming may have begun outpacing ability of farmers to adapt

If we would quit turning food into fuel, we wouldn’t have a problem.
————————-

A reasonable concern. The reports does address biofuel demand. The impact of climate change is in addition to impact of biofuel usage. I am not a fan of biofuel subsidies, but the rising price of oil will push biofuels independent of climate protection measures. Read the research.

That is good work by the senate. Now if the house follows up by shelving or voting down every non-essential administration appropriations request until the climate expenditures are rolled back and the EPA is put on a leash, I will be even happier.

I understand Clinton has resigned after leaked documents on Wikileaks.

Nope. That would have been worthy of a day-long headline on Drudge Report. No mention of Hillary resigning, although there were some rumors and suggestions she do so right after the release. No mention on Google News either, nor on the overnight TV news.

Sorry to disrupt your wishful thinking, but everything I can find says that hasn’t happened, we’re still stuck with her.

Now, if you happen to be very highly placed in the US federal government, and have released this fact you were made aware of to WUWT before the official announcement with the notifying of the press… That’s a very good fake name you’re using! Yup, they’ll have a tough time tracking you down and pressing charges! ☺

That picture of Hillary must have come from Wikileaks not Wikipedia. She needs a PR person to tell her how to smile.
The US should send nothing to developing countries for climate change since this is due to natural events not some Texan driving his SUV. It all end up in the pockets of some politician not the poor who need it anyway.

While you have a few sensible people in your Congress we have the RT Hon Gillard and her bunch of half wits who believe we need a price on carbon. Much of the population is finding it hard to pay their utilities now what with wind farms and desal plants. All because the BoM and CSIRO said we were really going to go to hell in a handbasket because of AGW/CC. The rain would stop and for a few years it did (El Nino) and now we wish it would (La Nina).

Perhaps common sense is breaking out, but there seems little hope of that among the UK politicians. What consistently amazes and disgusts me is not just the utterly cynical attitude of regimes such as that of Mugabe in Zimbabwe who is blaming his country’s agricultural failure on excess CO2 pruduced by evil Western Industrialists, but the idiot Western politicians who sign up for the payments to his and other similar regimes.

Well, at least now we know what Cancun was partying about… how to split the “take” from the good ‘ol USA… IMHO, we ought not to be funding ANY outside the USA government, agency or project. And certainly not with ‘handouts’.

Not to mention good old fashioned bribery and corruption, e.g., “Pay me $40,000 cash and we will select your $500,000 [USAID, WB, UN, ADB, IMF] contract bid.” That is an actual quote (once removed from my own ears) and it happens all the time.

You are absolutely correct that much of this aid and grant money is recycled directly back to the Anglo/Euro/Japanese donor countries through the consultancies large and small who are contracted to deliver the aid “services.”

It’s a huge multi-billion $$$ industry with an equally large and potent dependent constituency, which is precisely why all of the scam endeavors such as the UN, IPCC, WWF, and all of the other NGOs are so damned difficult to uproot. All off that “foreign aid” money is going straight to their pockets after being laundered through the alleged foreign beneficiaries and foreign projects.

“Climate-related appropriations grew from $315 million in fiscal 2009 to $1.3 billion in fiscal 2010. ”

This is just the tip of the climate ca$h iceberg. And with billions in ca$h from the tax payers, it is no wonder that we see a steady stream of inane press releases from the climate research crowd nearly every single day…

¨¡Eso es lo fantástico! ¡Es una oportunidad única para recobrar la atención del mundo!
¨ – C. Figueres
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres – since earlier this year – stopped by her hometown on the build-up to Cancun. While in San Jose, Costa Rica, she spoke with ´La Nacion.´ Her good news for her country-men is that mandatory ´donations´ from developed nations will be available to the first applicants [developing states] to submit plans for Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions [NAMA]. She implored her neighbors to finish the paperwork for infrastructure and mass transit improvements, ¨!The world will notice Costa Rica, again! ¨ {My translation.}
The bad news had been reported the day before by CR´s Canciller, Rene Castro: as a developing state, Costa Rica could no longer depend on aid to un-developed countries.
The bad news for tax-payers in the industrialized world: These ´contributions´ are mandatory.

Sadly, I really don’t think the US citizens know how much the AGW fraud is going to cost them. Here in the UK the draconian policies to curb the dreaded (life giving gas) CO2 have impoverished the middle classes, the working taxpaying people. We have a population of 60 million, and over 6 million in fuel poverty, this is due to the climate levy’s added to our bills, for example a small terraced house is billed around £150 a month for gas and £120 for electricity, petrol at the pumps is now £1.30 a litre. As a result of this food prices have skyrocketed, and the bill to feed a family of four for one week buying from the cheapest supermarket is around £120. Companies are closing or moving abroad, thousands of jobs are lost every day, on top of this we have wind turbines all over our once beautiful landscape, which were frozen and still last week in the coldest winter we have had for 100 years. What is the purpose of all this, well the EU want a world government, a world bank, a one world currency, a new world army, in fact they want to control and monitor everything you say, everything you do, how many children you have, how much you consume etc., etc., and by us depending on our plastic instead of real money it is achievable. People need to wake up, just follow the money trail to see who is behind it all.